Letters

Transition debate

The latest in the online discussion series organised by Talking About Socialism was a session titled ‘The middle class: what is it? How do we win it to communism?’, introduced by Peter Kennedy on May 12. The background reading for the talk was his recent article published on the TAS website, responding to aspects of Jack Conrad’s article, ‘Rediscovering our words’, which detailed some disagreements between TAS and the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee that have come out of the Forging Communist Unity process (Weekly Worker April 10 2025).

Peter began his talk by posing the question of whether the middle classes have a vested interest in capitalism, and whether this interest will necessitate a lengthy transition to communism. He presented his diagram, which details the relationships between different sections of the working and ruling class, and the contradictory position of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). He further argued that we ought to understand there to be a split within the “specialist middle class professions”, as there is a “hierarchical elite” at the top. The conclusion was that the contradictory, precarious position of the middle class will make the majority of them easy to win over, so they would not seek to prolong capitalism.

I raised a few disagreements with the article and talk. Contributions were limited to three minutes - a reliable trigger for my ‘post-Trotskyist stress disorder’ - so my four points were not as well-developed as they could have been.

First, I pointed out that Peter’s article does not properly answer the points about small capitalists made in ‘Rediscovering our words’. Instead it addresses the exploitation of workers within SMEs - a different subject.

Secondly, I asked if he favours a Marxist view of class, chiefly concerned with its relationship to the means of production, or a sociological view. From the article it seemed the latter: “… there exists a top brass at the top of other middle-class occupations - law, criminal justice system, police, military, senior civil service - who are, collectively, truly part of the capitalist class’s ruling apparatus.” Just as the labour aristocracy theory has no predictive capabilities, this idea of inherently ‘middle class’ professions, and the way Peter categorises them, does not have any use to revolutionaries. Any of these are subject to proletarianisation - comrade Nick Wrack (a barrister) helpfully gave successful strike action in his profession as an example.

Third, I asked Peter for his thoughts on section 3.19 of the CPGB’s Draft programme - the aspect of our minimum programme which contains proposals to address the instability of petty bourgeois life.

Peter summed up his talk by saying that small capitalists do not appear to have a real stake in capitalism, and would have more security in a communist society. Certainly, if we understand communism as a society shorn of states, classes and all exploitation, committed to the full development of the individual, then, of course, it would afford a former petty bourgeois greater security. My fourth and final point was to respond that this is true, but, since the same applies to everyone, trivial. The same can be said of large capitalists, and Marx recognised as much in the so-called ‘lost chapter’ of Capital volume 1, where he writes that a capitalist is just as enslaved by capital as a worker.

None of this reveals anything about how we win over the self-employed, nor about their status post-revolution.

In the discussion, one participant stated that the CPGB “has an idea of a lengthy transition period” and I asked for a source for this claim. In reply, Edmund Potts quoted from a more recent piece by Jack Conrad on the fusion talks: “As for socialising everything, we agree … but slowly” (‘Programme ’n’ chips’ Weekly Worker May 5). From the rest of the paragraph it is clear that comrade Conrad is arguing that a gradual approach towards socialising small businesses is likely to be required by necessity - not because the CPGB advocates gradualism for its own sake. It seems as though a game of Chinese whispers has been going on. Comrade Potts also drew attention to the phrase, “perhaps lasting a generation or two”, in the same article. He said that if a transition following a revolution was lasting this long it would be in trouble, and its viability should be questioned.

From the discussion I think I have a rough grasp of the differences. The CPGB sees communism - the end of class antagonisms - as the objective that workers are striving for, once we have taken power. As the economy is a global system that makes an anachronism of nation-states and their borders, the smashing of the bourgeois state will not complete the disappearance of capitalism. The class struggle must continue, through mass democracy in workers’ states which are committed to their own future non-existence.

In contrast, Peter Kennedy began his talk with the assumption, which no-one seemed to disagree with, that, as we enter the transition phase, workers have already “abolished capitalist ownership and control: [there will be] no surplus value extraction, no exploitation”. The roles of the SMEs “will be abolished, and they’ll take on new roles within the transitional phase” and, as SMEs become commonly owned, there will be “an immediate end to supply-chain super-exploitation”.

Nick Wrack put it even more strongly: capitalism is followed by communism, then communism develops. All we need to do to get there is win over the majority - by ‘talking about socialism’, presumably - to the brilliance of the communist ideal. No basis is given for why or how this will happen - only scholasticism: it simply must be this way or we contradict Marxism.

In fusion talks the idea has come up that we must avoid any details about transition, along with the term, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, in order to distance ourselves from the experience of the Soviet Union. Of course, we want to make it clear that the crimes and distortions of Stalinism have no place in our vision for communism, but using them to skirt over an issue is no solution, and is unlikely to help us avoid bureaucratic socialism in the future.

A subsequent comment on this session by TAS supporter Barry Biddulph has another way of putting the difference: “The CPGB leaders follow Lenin rather than Marx. In the tradition of Russian social democracy the dictatorship of the proletariat was a communist or socialist government using the state to crush counterrevolution. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat was the self-government of the workers in their grassroots organisations which have absorbed the functions of the state, including armed defence.”

The implication, elsewhere in this comment, that the CPGB and the Weekly Worker wholly endorses the culture and doctrines of Russian social democracy, is false, which will be clear to anyone who reads it. But what he advocates is no different, with the continuing existence of classes and a coercive state, however radical its difference from the bourgeois state might be.

Without a proper explanation, the idea of a successful working class revolution immediately causing the sudden death of wage-labour just sounds like wishful thinking. It is a terribly exciting notion which I would love to be able to believe: it would probably give our mental wellbeing a boost in the short-term, as would believing that revolution is only five years (or five calls for a general strike) away. But nothing in the history of class struggle suggests it is likely - any more than capitalism being abolished by the ‘second coming’ of Christ.

Chris S made the excellent point that to advocate any time scale on the transition would be to make ourselves hostages to fortune. It is indeed a speculative subject, on which no-one can pretend to have all the answers.

Different points of view on the character of different classes after the revolution, or on the nature of the transition to communism, are not of such an essential character that they should be a hindrance to communist unity. They are speculative matters, on which no-one should pretend to have all the answers. Even so, there is evidently still much to be clarified and debated on these matters.

TAS’s next public discussion is on Monday June 2, when Stephen Owens will be speaking about Reform UK.

Billy Clark
Email

Stalin praise

I noticed that some Trotskyist and ‘libertarian socialist’ social media accounts chose to commemorate the death of Trotskyist and ‘left’ oppositionist Karl Radek in a Soviet correctional labour camp on May 19 1939.

Some chose to use the adjective “killed”, perhaps to make the event more significant and dramatic than it actually was. It is, of course, impossible to establish all the exact facts of what happened nearly 90 years ago, but the best evidence and accounts suggest Radek died after getting into a fight with a fellow inmate and ‘left’ oppositionist named Varezhnikov.

Radek had been serving a sentence of 10 years imprisonment after being charged and found guilty in January 1937 of “being a member of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite centre, responsible for its criminal activities, but not directly participating in the organisation and execution of acts of a diversive, wrecking, espionage and terrorist nature” (my emphasis). Thirteen other defendants who had been found guilty of “direct involvement” (my emphasis) were sentenced to “the supreme penalty - to be shot”.

Radek had actively participated in the factional and disruptive operations of the Trotskyist and ‘left’ oppositions since 1923 and was finally expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, after helping organise an independent, semi-insurrectionary, anti-communist demonstration on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. One really can’t imagine anything more provocative, or even sacrilegious, if one can use such a word, than organising an anti-communist and anti-Soviet demonstration on such an anniversary.

Like many other oppositionists, he recanted his opposition a number of times and was readmitted to the party, only to be further disciplined for further factional and illegal activities. Disgraceful, scurrilous and disgusting behaviour and showing utter contempt for the Communist Party, its traditions and what it stood for in terms of establishing and building the world’s first socialist society and thus contributing enormously to the worldwide transition to socialism.

It was utterly cynical and contemptible that ‘leftists’ such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and presumably Radek, among others, prated continuously about the “world proletarian revolution”, when the first two specifically had actively opposed and even tried to sabotage the plans for the socialist revolution in Russia in October 1917. These ‘leftists’ in the 1920s violently opposed the very notion of building socialism in Russia after the revolution, despite the country’s vast economic potential, enormous natural and mineral resources, not to mention huge population.

It was never going to be easy and it wasn’t. The Bolsheviks had immediately to deal with external class enemies trying to overthrow Soviet power in the civil war, and later with internal enemies acting on behalf of the overthrown classes and determined to drown the revolution (and all communists) in blood.

Of course, opposition to the very concept of building socialism logically and inexorably led to the conclusion the socialist revolution itself should not have been attempted - a conclusion that Kamenev and Zinoviev arrived at a little earlier than their fellow ‘leftists’. It was predictable, but sad, that, faced with the living, concrete reality of a socialist society actually being built in front of their eyes, such ‘leftists’ should try and do everything possible to denigrate, undermine and, in the worst cases, actually sabotage it.

It is asserted, albeit frankly without any evidence whatsoever, that Radek was “murdered” in the camp and on Stalin’s orders. Given the year, I hardly think Stalin was especially concerned or bothered about people like Radek. It is exceptionally hard to see how Radek, while in a correctional labour camp, could have continued to constitute any kind of ‘threat’ to Soviet power or to Stalin personally. Bluntly, if Radek were to constitute any kind of threat by his earliest release date in 1947, the term of imprisonment could easily have been extended, as did happen to a number who had been sentenced to such initial terms.

Crowning this one of oh-so-many anti-Soviet conspiracy theories, is of course the biggy that the so-called public Moscow Trials were all a frame-up and, of course, personally directed down to the last detail by no other than Stalin himself. But, if Radek was such a “threat” in 1939, after having served two years in a labour camp, that Stalin took time off from everything else on his agenda to direct and organise his assassination, why on earth did he not take the opportunity to dispose of Radek in the 1937 trial, along with the 13 other defendants sentenced to the “supreme penalty”? Why was it that the court itself determined highly forensically that Radek (and one other), while part of the anti-Soviet terrorist centre, was not directly involved or participating in the actual organisation of the acts themselves, and thereby merited a more lenient punishment.

The question of direct or indirect involvement is often a very fine line. Many would take the view that being involved in the ‘general staff’ of a terrorist centre makes you as guilty as those you get to do your actual dirty work. So why didn’t the court find Radek guilty of the more serious charges? Did they not follow the alleged ‘script’? In that case, according to the conspiracy theories, that should have meant they were next for the chop, but they weren’t. Did the ‘director’ choose Radek for a more lenient verdict and sentence? But why? Did Stalin have some sort of soft spot for Radek? Unlikely. And crucially what changed in the two years between Radek being sentenced and his death, if the conspiracy theory is that Stalin ordered his murder?

None of the conspiracy theories add up or can be reconciled with each other.

Finally, it is interesting to note (especially given the later public and the military trial) that in an interview with a German politician in 1934 - ie, after Hitler’s rise to power - Radek stated that the Soviet government “should be close to Germany” and that there are “some fine lads in the SA and SS”. In 1936, he, along with marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, congratulated general Ernst Köstring on the day Germany occupied the Rhineland.

Of course, these were words and not concrete actions, and I am not suggesting for a second that those words alone prove their guilt in conspiring with the Axis powers. There is, however, a vast amount of exceptionally detailed evidence in the later trials themselves, which those who continue to proclaim the defendants were all ‘innocent’ really need to be able to disprove and in a systematic manner, otherwise I’m afraid such claims are just assertion, bluster and hot air.

Some more visceral Trotskyists such as Vadim Rogovin actually concede many of the points set out in the trials, but ‘justify’ the ‘leftists’ conspiracies on the basis, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’, and a violent, military-led coup d’etat in the late 1930s would have been in effect Trotsky’s ‘political revolution’.

We can be grateful to Mr Rogovin for his honesty.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Kneecap

The name of the band, ‘Kneecap’, is highly offensive to some - although no doubt they’ve created it as a commentary on the madness of the time of troubles in Ireland, when people were being kneecapped left, right and centre. It was and is an appalling punishment dished out as a form of street justice. Their name keeps on cropping up and the article by your Irish correspondent has made me want to listen to their music (‘Saying it loud and clear’, May 15). Politics is a messy business!

There’s a lot of bad language in their songs. Great stuff. Sing as you speak and you can’t go far wrong. They write highly provocative lyrics - long may they sing and stick the boot into the suffocating apparatus of state rule.

Elijah Traven
Hull

Long game

In January I rejoined the Labour Party after a gap of 31 years. I’d resigned in 1994, following the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader - I was following the mistaken advice of the now late Peter Taaffe.

In January I didn’t know that Sir Keir Starmer would means-test the winter fuel allowance and cut the personal independence payments and universal credit of new claimants. And now Starmer has echoed the words of Enoch Powell, when he said that Britons risk “being strangers in our own country”. These comments are the responsibility of Morgan McSweeney, the Labour equivalent of the Tories’ Dominic Cummings.

Given that Starmer is paving the way for a Nigel Farage-led majority Reform government, should I cancel my Labour membership direct debit? No. If only one in 10 Labour members are socialists, this still amounts to 30,000 people or 45 per constituency.

My view is that we should play the long game - let Starmer and Farage self-destruct. I’m sure many Labour members and activists are up in arms about the cuts to winter fuel allowance, PIP and UC, not to mention Starmer’s reference to Enoch Powell.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire